The approaches described in this section could be pursued but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A GSLB system may use a GSLB controller to balance workloads among multiple servers located at different geographical locations. The number of servers that provide network services to networked clients is tremendous. To duly balance workloads among multiple servers, the GSLB controller needs to know the status of each server in order to forward client requests only to the servers that are currently available for processing the client requests.
The servers may periodically report, directly or via server load balancers (SLBs) associated with each of the servers, the server status to the GSLB controller. Additionally, the GSLB controller may prompt the servers, or corresponding SLBs, to provide the server statuses to the GSLB controller. However, because servers include both local and remote servers with regard to a SLB, the GSLB controller may spend a significant amount of resources on checking the server statuses of remote servers that could be needed for load balancing because the servers co-located with the GSLB controller may not provide the optimal choice for serving the client request. Therefore, the GSLB controller may need to know server statuses of servers that are not co-located with the GSLB controller.